San Blas Day 55

March 5, 2023

We left at 9:30am and tried the new highway from La Cruz. It was costly at 223 pesos ($11.50) but such a nice drive on an almost empty road through 3 tunnels and beautiful vistas. We arrived very early in Rincon de Guayabitos at 9:10am to be exact… forgetting that there is an hour difference. The time zone changes in Lo de Marcos. Chicken Boy was opened, the reason for our stop there, but the chicken wasn’t quite ready. We walked around for a while then had a chicken breakfast!

We drove through Zacualpan where all the streets were closed to traffic because they were having some kind of celebration obvious by the amount of buses at the entrance of the town. We thought of stopping by to see what it was all about but there really weren’t any places to park anywhere close enough. While zigzagging through the maze of streets, loud bangs were scaring the pants out of us by their closeness and loudness. Mexicans love loud firecrackers and fireworks.

We drove through more little towns and villages like Ixtapa de la Concepcion, Platanitos, Santa Cruz and Itacama to name a few. We stopped at a bunch of beautiful beaches at Las Islitas. It was interesting that all the ramadas, little restaurants on the beach, had palapas for cars with tables and chairs. People were bringing their own food or ordering at the restaurants and everyone had shade. All the restaurants had oysters. We continued driving on the sandy road and finally got to a beach where we found men diving for oysters.

Just before arriving in San Blas, we stopped at Mirador de Las Aves, a small lookout and saw crocodiles and a bunch of pretty birds.

We arrived at our hotel called Hacienda Flamingos which was build in the early 1880 by the Train Line Southern Pacific. In 1883 a ship docked in San Blas with Angela Peralta, a famous opera singer, who was on her way home to Mazatlan. Unfortunately she was sick from the yellow fever and infected many people. It is believed that 80% of the town got it and about 40,000 people eventually died from it. The railroad abandoned the project of connecting San Blas to Nogales. It was bought in the early 1900 and became an hotel in 1951.

The original part of the hacienda was gorgeous and the grounds around the pool and the chapel were beautiful but the rooms that had been added when it became an hotel, looked like they hadn’t been touched since their last renovation in the 90s. We had a cd player in our room and magazines were from 2014. The artwork was all faded. We took a nap on the hard as rock bed then went for a walk. We found the harbor with the shrimp boats and Pogo droned over it. We were worried about it because there were a few national guards with their big guns walking around.

We walked around the center of town and started looking for a restaurant. Everything was closed and the streets were empty. We were lucky to find a little restaurant called La Familia. We both had shrimp (specialty of San Blas) with garlic butter and they were delicious. We were back at our hotel at 6:30pm. The bar wasn’t opened and we could have picked a movie from the hotel 200 DVDs collection from 20 years ago to watch in our room but we decided to just read and Pogo was snoring at 8pm. I renamed the town to San Blah as it wasn’t a Blast….